Taylor Swift may be prone to leaving Easter eggs for her fans, but she admits that fans can go to extreme places when trying to decipher her songs and that extensive decoding is still “weird” for her.
While sitting down with the New York Times for being featured on their 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters list released Tuesday, the singer-songwriter reflected on how the inspiration behind her songwriting has become an obsession for fans.
“There’s corners of my fanbase who are gonna take things to a really extreme place,” Swift said. “There’s nothing I can do about that. There’s people who are gonna try to, like, do detective work, figure out the details — who is that about? What is this?”
“When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s a paternity test,” she said. “Like, ‘This song’s about that person.’ Because I’m like, ‘That dude didn’t write the song, I did.’ But that’s part of it,” she added.
Swift has never publicly identified the subjects of her songs (apart from giving the “Tay” Easter egg in the liner notes of her Speak Now album for her song “Back to December” to note that it was about her ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner) but that hasn’t stopped fans from trying to put two and two together.
In the weeks ahead of the release of her album The Tortured Poets Department, fans initially speculated it would be about her breakup with ex-boyfriend actor Joe Alwyn given how similar the album’s title is to the WhatsApp group chat “Tortured Man Club,” which Alwyn said he’s part of with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. A track on the album, “So Long, London,” also seem to hint at a breakup and the British actor.
After the album’s release, fans also pointed to lyrics that seemed to reference her reported relationship with 1975 frontman Matt Healy. Other people fans have theorized Swift’s songs are about are John Mayer for Swift’s “Dear John” song, Harry Styles for the 1989 album and Jake Gyllenhaal for “All Too Well.”
Despite the intense analysis, Swift expressed the importance of abiding by her own “perception” when writing the song.
“You have to hold tight to your perception of your art and your relationship with it, and then you kind of have to [mimes blowing it out] there it goes. Hope you like it. And if you don’t now, hope you do in five years, and if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway.”
In the Times profile, Swift also opened up about her songwriting process and the origins of some of her most iconic singles including “Love Story.” Other songwriters on the list include Stevie Wonder, Jay-Z, Dolly Parton, Diane Warren and more.
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